The pro-Hamas uprising that broke out across American universities after October 7 roused once-somnolent alumni and donors. That awakening has now produced a new university charter, called a “Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania,” drafted by Penn professors. Penn’s most recent president, Liz Magill, had to resign on December 9, following widely mocked testimony at a congressional hearing on campus anti-Semitism. The charter’s authors, along with Penn’s rebel donors, hope to make agreement with the new constitution a requirement for Penn’s new president. If enough Penn constituents, especially faculty, endorse it, the board of trustees will be compelled to adopt such a prerequisite, their thinking goes. An ongoing donation boycott provides the financial pressure. Ultimately, alumni across the country may be inspired to seek a similar foundational shake-up in their own alma maters, the drafters hope.

The new constitution adopts the thinking behind the Kalven Report, drafted in 1967 at the University of Chicago. Penn must henceforth abstain from adopting an institutional position on political issues. Embracing an official line alienates dissenting members of the university who might want to challenge “common orthodoxies,” explains the charter. Individual members of the university, by contrast, shall be free to propose, test, and reject the “widest spectrum of perspectives.”

The university’s selection committees have one mission only: identifying excellence. Hiring non-excellent diversity candidates makes it harder to attract outstanding faculty and students. (This assertion will seem commonsensical to anyone who believes in merit. The diversity complex would respond that, to the contrary, faculty and students shun non-“diverse” institutions. Sadly, in some cases, especially in the case of woke students, the diversity complex is correct. That does not make Penn 2.0 wrong, however, to seek to break the stranglehold of diversity thinking.) The new constitution posits that an unambiguous, publicly understood commitment to excellence will give Penn a competitive edge in hiring and student admissions in the decades ahead. This, too, seems commonsensical. Testing such a hypothesis is long overdue.